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The Looting of Africa Titulo Bond, Patrick The Looting of Africa Titulo Bond, Patrick - Autor/a Autor(es) Globalization and the Washington Consensus : its influence on democracy and En: development in the south Buenos Aires Lugar CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales Editorial/Editor 2008 Fecha Sur-Sur Colección Exportaciones; Agotamiento de recursos; Petróleo; Inversiones extranjeras directas; Temas Desigualdad; Subdesarrollo; Imperialismo; Pobreza; Subsidios; Agricultura; Deuda ecológica; África; Capítulo de Libro Tipo de documento http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/clacso/sur-sur/20100707033344/07bond.pdf URL Reconocimiento-No comercial-Sin obras derivadas 2.0 Genérica Licencia http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.es Segui buscando en la Red de Bibliotecas Virtuales de CLACSO http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) Conselho Latino-americano de Ciências Sociais (CLACSO) Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) www.clacso.edu.ar Bond, Patrick. The looting of Africa. En publicación: Globalization and the Washington Consensus: its influence on democracy and development in the south. Gladys Lechini (editor). Buenos Aires : CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2008. ISBN 978-987-1183-91-3 Disponible en: http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/sursur/lech/07bond.pdf Red de Bibliotecas Virtuales de Ciencias Sociales de América Latina y el Caribe de la Red CLACSO http://www.biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/ [email protected] Patrick Bond* The Looting of Africa Introduction Unequal trade and investment relationships are nothing new for Af- rica, although beginning in 2005 the world’s attention was drawn to Africa’s plight as never before. However, in contrast to the neo-or- thodox strategy implied by Gordon Brown, Bono, Bob Geldoff and other mainstream campaigners, Africa’s deepening integration into the world economy has typically generated not wealth but the out- flow of wealth. There is new evidence available to demonstrate this conclusively, just as the current fusion of neoliberalism and neocon- servatism consolidates. In fact, the deeper global power relations that keep Africa down (and, simultaneously, African elites shored up) should have been obvi- ous to the world during 2005. It was a year in which numerous events * PhD from the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environ- mental Engineering in Baltimore, USA. Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Na- tal School of Development Studies, Durban. Director at the University of KwaZulu- Natal Centre for Civil Society, Durban. 1 A longer version of the argument under the title Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation is published by Zed Books in July 2006. 83 Globalization and the Washington Consensus were lined up to ostensibly help liberate Africa from poverty and pow- erlessness, to provide relief from crushing debt loads, to double aid and to establish a ‘development round’ of trade: - the mobilization of NGO-driven citizens campaigns like Brit- ain’s Make Poverty History and the Johannesburg-based Global Call to Action Against Poverty (throughout 2005); - Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa (February); - The main creditor countries’ debt relief proposal (June); - a tour of Africa by the new World Bank president Paul Wolfow- itz (June); - the G8 Gleneagles debt and aid commitments (July); - the Live 8 consciouness-raising concerts (July); - the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals review (September); - the return to Nigeria of monies looted by Sani Abacha and de- posited in Swiss bank accounts (September); - the IMF/World Bank annual meeting addressing debt and Third World ‘voice’ (September); - a large debt relief package for Nigeria (October); and - the deal done at the World Trade Organization’s ministerial summit in Hong Kong (December). These all revealed global-elite hypocrisy and power relations which remained impervious to advocacy, solidarity and democratization. At best, partial critiques of imperial power emerged amidst the cacoph- ony of all-white rock concerts and political grandstanding. At worst, polite public discourse tactfully avoided capital’s blustering violence, from Nigeria’s oil-soaked Delta to northeastern Congo’s gold mines to Botswana’s diamond finds to Sudan’s killing fields. Most of the Lon- don charity NGO strategies ensured that core issue areas –debt, aid, trade and investment– would be addressed in only the most superfi- cial ways. The 2005 events also revealed the limits of celebrity-chasing tactics aimed at intra-elite persuasion rather than pressure. Tragically, the actual conditions faced by most people on the continent continued to deteriorate. Today, Africa is still getting progressively poorer, with per capita incomes in many countries below those of the 1950s-60s era of in- dependence. If we consider even the most banal measure of poverty, most Sub-Saharan African countries suffered an increase in the per- 84 Patrick Bond centage of people with income of less than $1/day during the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank itself concedes2 (World Bank, 2005c:66). Not just poverty but also inequality must be central to the analysis, for Africa hosts some of the world’s worst cases. The following coun- tries exceed a 0.50 Gini coefficient score, placing them at the very top of the world’s ranking: Namibia, Botswana, the Central African Republic, Swaziland, Lesotho, South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, The Gambia and Zimbabwe. Table 1 African inequality (Gini coefficients by country, early 2000s)* Namibia 72 Burundi 41 Botswana 65 Nigeria 41 Central African Republic 62 Burkina Faso 40 Swaziland 61 Angola 39 Lesotho 58 Senegal 39 South Africa 57 Mozambique 39 Zambia 53 Mali 38 Malawi 51 Ghana 38 The Gambia 50 Guinea 38 Zimbabwe 50 Mauritania 37 Madagascar 46 Benin 36 Cote d’Ivoire 43 Tanzania 35 Kenya 42 Níger 33 Uganda 42 Etiopía 28 Cameroon 41 Mauritius 19 Source: World Bank (2005), World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, Washington, p.39. * A Gini score of 0 is perfect equality while 100 indicates that one person has all the income and all others have none. Scores above.50 represent quite extreme conditions. Bank staff calculated Gini coefficients from household survey data, and dates differ by data availability. The looting of Africa has also been intensely gendered. Women are the main victims of systemic poverty and inequality, whether in produc- tive circuits of capital (increasingly subject to sweatshop conditions) 2 For a critique of the $/day measure, see Reddy, S. (2005). 85 Globalization and the Washington Consensus or in the ‘sphere of reproduction’ of households and labour markets, where much primitive accumulation occurs through unequal gender power relations. There are many ways, Dzodzi Tsikata and Joanna Kerr have shown, that markets and mainstream economic policy ‘per- petuate women’s subordination’ (Tsikata and Kerr, 2002). In particular, the denial of Africans’ access to food, medicines, energy and even water is a common reflection of neoliberal domi- nance in social policy, as people who are surplus to capitalism’s la- bour power requirements find that they had better fend for themselves –or simply die. In even relatively prosperous South Africa, an early death for millions –disproportionately women– was the outcome of state and employer reaction to the AIDS epidemic, with cost-benefit analyses demonstrating to the state and capital that keeping most of the country’s five to six million HIV-positive people alive through pat- ented medicines cost more than the people were ‘worth’3. The decimated social wage is one indicator of Africa’s amplified underdevelopment in recent years. In the pages that follow, however, we focus on the material processes of Africa’s underdevelopment via trade and extractive-oriented investment, largely through the deple- tion of natural resources. This is an area of research that has already helped catalyse the ecological debt and reparations movement, and that has sufficient intellectual standing to be the basis of a recent World Bank study, Where is the Wealth of Nations? (World Bank, 2005a) (A similar critique could be levelled against financial processes, showing how the June 2005 G7 Finance Ministers’ debt relief deal perpetuates rather than ends debt peonage4.) The story is not new, of course. We can never afford ourselves the luxury of forgetting the historical legacy of a continent looted: trade by force dating back centuries; slavery that uprooted around 12 million Africans; land grabs; vicious taxation schemes; precious metals spirited away; the appropriation of antiquities to the Brit- ish Museum and other trophy rooms; the 19th century emergence of racist ideologies to justify colonialism; the 1884-85 carve-up of Africa into dysfunctional territories in a Berlin negotiating room; the construction of settler-colonial and extractive-colonial systems In the case of the vast Johannesburg/London conglomerate Anglo American Cor- poration, the cut-off for saving workers in 2001 was 12%. The lowest-paid 88% of em- ployees were more cheaply dismissed once unable to work, with replacements found amongst South Africa’s 42% unemployed reserve army of labour, according to an inter- nal study reported by the Financial Times. For more, see Bond, Patrick (2005). One of the strongest recent overviews of African debt is Capps, G. (2005); see also Bond, P. (2006). 86 Patrick Bond –of which apartheid, the German occupation of Namibia, the Portu- guese colonies and King Leopold’s Belgian Congo
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